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Holy
Trinity, Hempton

Of all Norfolk's parish churches, Holy
Trinity must be among the least known, and the least
visited. And yet, there is a reason why this is an
important place for anyone interested in Norfolk's lost
churches. We will come to this in a moment. But first we
have to find Hempton. It is the undistinguished southern
suburb of Fakenham, little more than a triangle of
streets where the roads head out of town and off to
Swaffham and Dereham. The church is visible from neither
road, and indeed is not on a road at all. We eventually
found it by heading down a side road which appeared to
lead nowhere, and then driving along a bumpy track beside
a scrubby recreation area. There, behind a low wall, we
found what appeared to be a 19th century church, although
there is rather more to it than that. The high pitched
western end is set perpendicular to it, as if another
church had been built on to it sideways. The bell turret
is unusually tall and slender. Curiously, the newer bit
incorporates masonry which is far older.

Pevsner
records that Hempton had two churches in medieval days,
but Holy Trinity is neither of them. The Victorian bit is
the work of JH Hakewill in the 1850s. More imaginative is
JP Chaplin's westward extension of the early 1950s.

As with
many churches around here, Holy Trinity is in the
devotional, Anglo-catholic tradition. You enter through a
side door on the south side, which takes you through the
join between the two halves of the building. The 19th
century nave and chancel are all in one; they are low key
and relatively undistinguished, apart from the reredos,
which is an ornate, tiled affair. Where the altar used to
stand against it there is a curiosity, an inscription
which originally would have been hidden. It remembers
parishioners who fell asleep in the Faith and Love of
the Holy Catholic Church, by which these 19th
century Anglo-catholics meant the Church of England, of
course - a fascinating historical survival. The reredos
must have been installed a long time after Hakewill's
building, perhaps in the early 20th century, and the
memorial stone will be contemporary with it.

Even more
fascinating is Chaplin's extension westwards. It is
separated from the 19th century church by a tall, 14th
century-style chancel arch. However, because the
extension is sideways on, the arch is much closer to the
back of the church than to the front. What makes it
rather interesting is that the extension was built using
masonry from the demolished church of St Michael at Thorn, in Norwich. This
church was damaged in World War II, and being surplus to
requirements was taken down to make way for the car park
of the ECN building. The pinnacles of its tower are
incorporated into the structure of a side altar here,
along with tracery from the windows of the ruined church
nearby at Pudding Norton. Outside, in the
west wall, shadowed by bushes and almost hidden to the
view of even those who make it this far, you can see the
15th century flushwork shields that once lined the tower
base of St Michael at Thorn. Ghosts of a forgotten
patronage, they faced out on to busy Ber Street in the
centre of Norwich for more than half a millennium.